One of Tom Daley's main Olympic rivals has described as "curious" his attempt to manage medal expectations in the wake of the Briton's public dispute with his coach.

The Australian diver Matthew Mitcham, the 2008 Olympic gold medallist in the discipline, said that Daley was trying to "have his cake and eat it" by building a high media profile but absolving himself of the pressure to win a medal.

British Diving's performance director, Alexei Evangulov, said last week that Daley needed to reduce his media commitments and focus on his training if he was to stand a chance of beating the Chinese, who were training "three times harder".

Daley hit back through a statement issued by his advisers, who defended his media work and said they turned down "95% of media and commercial approaches".

But the statement added that they "fully agree public expectation is too high around Tom" given the dominance of the Chinese diver Qiu Bo on the 10m platform.

"What piqued my curiosity was when Tom came out to the media saying 'don't put any pressure of expectation on me because I don't know if I can win a medal or whatever,'" said Mitcham, beaten by Daley at the 2009 world championships and 2010 Commonwealth Games. "I thought you can't really have your cake and eat it too.

"You can't be the poster boy of the Olympics, get all the endorsements and reap all the rewards and absolve yourself of all the responsibility and all the expectation."

Mitcham, who has recently recovered from injury to return to competition, said that while he "applauds Tom's honesty", he found his position "curious".

"He does have a lot of pressure on him and I do feel a little bit sorry for him. But that's what we do and that's what a mature, experienced athlete does – they compete with various different external factors – environmental factors, pressure from within and pressure from outside. It's the mark of a really good athlete."

Daley will compete on Thursday for the first time at the Fina World Cup, taking place at the aquatics centre on the Olympic Park, partnering Pete Waterfield in the synchro.

In his statement, Daley acknowledged that Bo was the favourite in London and "the man to beat", likening his dominance to that of Novak Djokovic in tennis.

But Mitcham said he believed that the Chinese divers could be vulnerable under pressure when the stakes were high.

"They tend to have a problem at that really high level with stress and diving under pressure. They're certainly not infallible," he said. "That's what happened in 2007 at the world championships where Russia won, that's what happened in the World Cup in 2008 when a German won, at the Olympics where I won, in 2009 when Tom won, in 2010 when I won."